Archive (Page 3 of 4)

Social media com­pa­nies have an unpar­al­leled amount of influ­ence over our mod­ern com­mu­ni­ca­tions. […] These com­pa­nies also play a huge role in shap­ing our glob­al out­look on moral­i­ty and what con­sti­tutes it. So the ways in which we per­ceive dif­fer­ent imagery, dif­fer­ent speech, is being increas­ing­ly defined by the reg­u­la­tions that these plat­forms put upon us [in] our dai­ly activ­i­ties on them.

I won­der with all these vary­ing lev­els of needs that we have as users, and as we live more and more of our lives dig­i­tal­ly and on social media, what would it look like to design a semi‐private space in a pub­lic net­work?

I think that pri­va­cy is some­thing that we can think of in terms of a civ­il right, as indi­vid­u­als. […] That’s a civ­il rights issue. But I think there’s also a way to think about it in terms of a social issue that’s larg­er than sim­ply the indi­vid­ual.

How do we take this right that you have to your data and put it back in your hands, and give you con­trol over it? And how do we do this not just from a tech­no­log­i­cal per­spec­tive but how do we do it from a human per­spec­tive?

As we’re giv­ing our homes this new lay­er of smart­ness and intel­li­gence, we’re giv­ing away its own­er­ship to very large orga­ni­za­tions. And as we become a gen­er­a­tion of renters, what I’m very inter­est­ed in is how do land­lords respond to that?

We have to know what we want. We have to imag­ine how it looks. We have to under­stand how it feels, how it smells, how it func­tions, before we can design it. Before we can code it. Before we can imple­ment it, and before we can sell it.

You don’t need a CS degree to know how [tech­nolo­gies] impact your life, so how do we start exam­in­ing those impacts and then lead­ing with an under­stand­ing of what we actu­al­ly want to build, how we want to build it, and let­ting the imag­i­na­tive capa­bil­i­ties of all of these peo­ple dri­ve that.

The whole Library Freedom Project, every­thing that we do is very deeply inspired by Aaron’s spir­it, his work in resis­tance, his lega­cy. And every day that we go into libraries and teach prac­ti­cal pri­va­cy train­ings, I feel like Aaron is very much present in all that we do.